Without Armor, Armored
by Androktones
Summary: When the party returns to Skyhold after the final battle, the Inquisitor and her Commander pause in her chambers. "She is just a woman, his woman, the way he is her man, and here he can love her and she can be weak and neither of them are the lesser for it." Includes non-explicit adult themes, bathing, sensuality, and brief appearances from party members.


A/N: Another CullenxTrevelyan story, for you lovely guys and dolls. Review if you don't mind, por favor.

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"Without Armor, Armored"

Corypheus is dead.

Downstairs she can hear the Great Hall full of revelers, the stomping of feet and Maryden's fiddle, Iron Bull yelling, "Chargers, more casks! Drink up!" She's sure Varric is regaling people with the tale of the battle, and Sera's inserting plenty of "tit"s and "arse"s to keep it interesting.

The _real_ party will take place a few weeks' hence, and will be a much grander affair. As Josephine had noted, invitations alone will take _days_. Empress Celene won't be able to attend, but perhaps her lover, Briala, will, and Leliana has it on good authority that even Queen Elissa, back from far-flung lands, will be making an appearance with her husband. Dignitaries from Antiva, Orlais and Fereldan will come, food and drink from all over will need to be acquired. Flowers, and musicians, and of course a place to put them all…

As Sera says, often and with much distaste, "Inquissy's work is never done."

She will join them later, she said, but her first order of business was to get _clean_. She's still got dragon blood on her, after all, and she thinks there might be ashes in her shoes. With a wink, she'd said, "not all of us can pull of stink with such aplomb as _you_, Bull."

Varric had promised her a pint when she finished, and Dorian offered assurance that he would save her a dance ("Some men _can _dance," he'd said with a smile at Cullen, whose glower in response didn't reach his eyes). So she'd managed an escape to her chambers with minimal collateral damage, after all.

And that is how she has ended up standing in the center of her room, trying to muster up the energy to rid herself of her armor. The door to the main hall opens downstairs, and she hears Iron Bull yelling, "Go get her, Commander! Give her a _real_ welcome home!"

When he enters the room, he doesn't speak, and she is grateful. He knows as well as she does how hard silence is to come by in their lives: in Skyhold, in camp, on the roads. Cullen stands before her, his warrior's frame illuminated by the sun starting to dip behind the mountains outside her windows. For tonight he has foregone his cloak and mail, but he is impressive, tall and broad.

Still silent, he kisses her forehead once, softly, and gently, gingerly, he starts to remove her armor. She doesn't need to tell him how grateful she is for this: her advisors all saw how her sword arm dangled limply as she climbed the stairs – only sprained, still functional, but wounded nonetheless. Gloves and bracers come first, and she marks the way his lips thin at the damage to both, at the scorch marks and the blood (some of it is hers, but he doesn't need to know), and he kisses her upturned palms. His lips are smooth against the Mark where it lies against her sword-roughened skin.

When he moves behind her to begin unbuckling the shoulder clasps fastening her pauldrons to her chest plate he murmurs, "I've already sent for a tub and water."

She drops her head back against his shoulder and sighs out, "my dearest love, has anyone ever told you that you are _perfect?_"

His laugh is dark and sweet as honey as he kisses her temple. "An Orlesian noble or two might have mentioned something along those lines at Halamshiral, yes."

Cullen runs his gloved hands over the place on her chest where the dragon bone and silver plate yawn open, where the edges are jagged and sharp like a Revenant's teeth. He doesn't ask but she says anyway, "the claws of Corypheus' dragon. Solas was with me and fixed most of the damage there on the field."

She closes her eyes after that, briefly; she may not have always agreed with Solas, may not have _understood _him in many ways, but he was her _friend_, her brother-at-arms…or staff. She trusted him to have her back, to patch her hurt, and he trusted her to take down trolls and darkspawn before they could get to him. He had been there from the beginning, had sat over her prone form in Haven and followed her through the Fade. The paintings in his tower, beautiful though they are, are poor recompense for his loss.

"Leliana has her people looking," Cullen says as he lifts her arms over her head to pull the metal free, marking how she hisses in pain and kissing the line of her neck in apology.

"They won't find him. Solas told me so himself. He's gone…somewhere. Maybe that 'somewhere' isn't even a place we _can_ go. Morrigan can walk between worlds, but even she is _real_. With Solas sometimes I wasn't so sure."

As four chambermaids bustle in, two for the tub and two for the water, she expects Cullen to step away, to busy himself with something on her desk, to reinforce their roles as Inquisitor and Commander. But instead he continues in his task, skimming his hands over her waist as he begins to loosen her swordbelt and unfasten her greaves, smoothing his palms over her calves as he slips her legs free of their boots. One of the chambermaids giggles, and another elbows her in the side.

"Hush!"

And then they are gone, and he is peeling the sweat-stained leathers away from her ribs, down over her hips. She sees how his eyes go soft at the new thin line that marks her torso, wrapping from just below her navel to curve up and around to her back. _Magic can keep us alive_, she thinks, _but not always unmarked._

His hands, even in his gloves, are warm as Cullen unwraps her breastband, passing the dingy linen from one to the other as he winds it below her arms. In another time, in another place, the heat might be sparking low and bright in her, but today, here, with the world unmade and made again and still spinning but _changed _she just feels…tired.

She puts a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as he pulls her smallclothes down, as she steps out of it, and there is nothing alluring in either of their actions now, just tenderness.

And then she is standing in front of the mirror in her room, naked as the Maker made her, as the steam from the tub twirls up into the air behind her. She remembers looking in the mirror like this, a long time ago, a _lifetime _ago, in her parents' bedroom in Ostwick. She was wearing a blue dress, then, and her mother had let her wear rouge for the first time and she had snuck sips of her father's Orlesian wine and danced with the son of the De Launcet's until he got a little too handsy and her eldest sister swept her away. But now, the places where the weight of her armor rested are scarlet, and she can see the indentations from the chainmail on her skin, the welts on her wrists from where her bracers' rubbed raw; Bull tried to bend them back in proper shape on the road, but they still chafed. She sees where the Mark lies, silent but thrumming with power, even in sleep. Dried blood, scabs and bruises. A weapon wrapped in flesh.

_Even naked, the Inquisitor,_ she thinks.

And she slowly sinks into the tub as Cullen busies himself collecting her discarded armor, takes it downstairs – when the door opens she can hear Sera laughing and the crowd chanting "chug, chug, chug!" – the sky is sinking swiftly into twilight, only a thin green line marks where the Rift had been, and the chambermaids have poured Antivan sandalwood and Orlesian rose water in with the bathwater as if she is a noble again, as if she is something more than a weapon crafted by accident for a use no longer required.

She starts to cry.

Once she starts she can't stop, as if all of the tears she's been saving up since the last time she cried – _when was that? Before Skyhold, certainly? Maybe that first morning in Haven?_ – have been roiling around inside her waiting for a crack, waiting to force their way out and into the world.

But Cullen is at her side now, kneeling at the edge of the tub, and his brow is furrowed with worry – _why does she make it such a habit of worrying the man_,she thinks between hiccupping sobs – and he is asking her softly, "what's wrong? My love, what is _wrong_?"

She can't answer, keeps crying, and she buries her head in her knees where it stays.

Corypheus is dead, and the world is saved, and her friends and her lover are _alive_, but she feels so _ugly _all of a sudden, indelicate, unneeded, _tired_.

From where her face is pressed to her knees she manages to say, "I'm sorry. I just…I just feel…well, everything, at the moment."

He strips his hands of their gloves, brushes her naked shoulder, and to her shock, he begins to wash her skin, gently, tenderly; the cloth the maids brought in his hand just barely touches her as he moves with care. Cullen waits, waits for her to find her way to sense, and then to some measure of calm, as her sobs taper off, grow quiet, grow slower, and cease.

He begins to wash her shoulders, sweeping the cloth behind her neck from one side to the other, and finally she says, "Corypheus is dead, and I should feel happy. Overjoyed. But instead I feel _empty _and tired and ugly. Our purpose was so sure: close the breach, kill Corypheus, stop the end of the world. I just kept moving, moving forward and onward, and I suppose it is all just catching up with me now. It must sound very foolish."

He stills where he is soaping her arm, where he is washing away the grit and the ashes; his touch is whisper-soft over the raw wounds on her wrists.

"I don't think it sounds foolish," he says, and she loves him enough to believe him, "When I left the Templars, I felt much the same. You spend so much time working towards a single thing, a goal…when it is finished, I would think it quite natural to wonder what is next."

He wrings out the washcloth, and using the ewer beside the tub he rinses her arm clean, begins to soap her leg, keeps speaking, "But in time, you find a new purpose, a new goal. And some things don't change."

Then he kisses the instep of her foot, held securely in his hand, before placing it gently back in the water. He begins to wash the other, his focus in this as dogged as in all other things.

"A year and a half ago," she murmurs as he moves to kneel at the head of the tub, "I was just the youngest daughter of a minor branch of a noble family from the Free Marches…"

"A year and a half ago," he replies softly, "I was a lyrium-addicted ex-Templar with nothing left in me but bitterness. I think we've both become more since then."

He kisses her shoulder, his mouth hot on her bare skin where it rises above the lip of the tub, lifts her unbound hair up to kiss the back of her neck, wet, open-mouthed, and to the right shoulder, where she feels the barest touch of his tongue. He washes her hair of dirt and soot and blood, runs his hands through the tangles until they part under his fingers. And if she cries a little at his tenderness, his _gentleness _here, it does not matter, as the tears hide in the bathwater perfectly well.

And then she is stepping out of the tub into the white towel he holds apart for her, into his embrace. She spares only the briefest look for the water in the bath, and tries not to think too much about how much the color has changed. She clutches the towel to herself as he cups her face in his hands. Cullen runs the pads of his thumbs over her cheekbones and she closes her eyes at his touch.

She is the Herald of Andraste and the Inquisitor. She can wield a sword or a word equally sharply. She has kept an Empire from toppling, bathed a land in blood, killed a man who would become a God. For so many she is a symbol, a tool, a _force_. But she isn't any of that to him, she thinks, not here, not now. She is just a woman, _his _woman, the way he is _her _man, and here he can love her and she can be weak and neither of them are the lesser for it, but _better_.

And he kisses her and she kisses him and then they are lying sprawled atop her coverlet, and the dying sun makes his hair go dark like burnished brass as she meets his mouth. His hands on her are soft, and he is so _careful_ not to hurt her when he lies above her.

Fingers deft, she pulls at his shirt, damp where she pressed against him, until it is loose from his trousers, and then it is over his shoulders, discarded on the floor. His fingers twine in her still-wet hair and his lips part to hers as she slips her tongue into his mouth, tastes the barest hint of the mead they had toasted with before she escaped to her chamber, and he groans.

They do not need words for this, for the way his hands span her breasts, the way her body curves against his touch, the way his hair clings to his forehead as she kisses his chest, eyes half-lidded. His mouth on her skin is better than any balm, more healing than any salve or spell. To be his lover means more than any name, any title, any gift. He worships her with his lips, his tongue, with the warmth of his breath on her body.

And when the heat of him fills her and she wraps around him, the words need not be voiced: _Safe. Cherished. Home_.

She is astride his lap, and his mouth is at her throat as she moves above him, and with his lips on her pulse the word thrums in the rapidly-darkening room: _alive, alive, alive, alive_.

She is alive, and he is alive, and later tonight they will walk downstairs together hand in hand, and Varric will grin, and Josephine will nudge Cassandra, who will roll her eyes but smile because this is better than any story, and Iron Bull will make a lewd gesture which will have Sera laughing. Dorian's eyes will be soft and warm over the rim of his wine glass and Vivienne will wonder when the wedding will be and Cole will say something sweet and lovely and _true_ and Solas is gone but they were fortunate to have kept him as long as they did, and even his loss will not dampen the joy in this.

But that will come later, and as his body shudders and his head falls to rest against her sweat-slicked shoulder, he breathes out, "my beloved, my dearest."

When she meets her peak after, aided by his clever fingers which are not so gentle now, she sighs, "Cullen, my love, my heart."

As the sweat cools on their skin, they lie beside each other, and she presses a kiss to his temple. They have each become _more_ since this journey began, but they have become what is _best _together.


End file.
